Microsoft Denies Allegations That It Censors Bing Outside China

Microsoft has been faced with some pretty serious allegations from cyber-censorship monitoring group Greatfire.org. They claim that Microsoft is deploying Chinese censorship on a “global scale” based on earlier research conducted by the Guardian newspaper in the UK. While Microsoft admit to censoring Bing search results in China, because they legally have to just like Google, Yahoo and others have to, they strongly deny censoring their Chinese Bing site outside of China.

“We can emphatically confirm that they are not, Bing search results outside of China are not subject to and are not modified in any way based on Chinese law.” Said Stefan Weitz, Bing Senior Director.

On the other hand Greatfire.org stated that, based on their findings:

“We are 100% sure our findings indicate that Microsoft is cleansing search results in the United States to remove negative news and information about China….And they are doing this in every market in which they operate in the world.”

The reason this has been so controversial is that we’ve come to expect all companies to censor certain things inside China but we don’t expect those same censorship practices to be applied at a global level. What are your thoughts on the possibility of Bing censoring their Chinese site for users outside of China?